Sarah Kanning

Here’s a great place to start: 50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work, courtesy of Jerry Oltion and the folks at SFWA.
I appreciated this list because, like the author, I find that any productivity strategy that works for me does not work forever — the work-avoidance part of my brain is far too clever for that.

[Read more →]

I’ve been thinking about On Writing, Stephen King’s memoir/writing treatise a lot in the last two days, because Monday morning I awoke to some medium-to-severe back pain. A trip to a massage therapist didn’t help, and it felt even worse today. Grrr. In general, I lead a largely pain-free existence, and on days like these [...]

[Read more →]

Skipping the writer’s bookshelf for the moment to plug an online tool I use all the time: WorldCat (www.worldcat.org). No, it doesn’t have anything to do with cats, unfortunately — the “cat” is short for catalog, and it’s (among other things) an aggregator of  information from libraries all over the world about their holdings.
If you [...]

[Read more →]

This week, I’m recommending a book to all those tired and bedraggled writers who are now more than two-thirds of the way through National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). If you need balm for your weary souls, this is it: If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. This book was first published in 1938, [...]

[Read more →]

I was talking to my mom the other week, and mentioned a teenager I know who was agonizing over a college admissions essay. Some things never change, and yes, students still have to provide some written proof of their essential humanity and worthiness to study at whatever institution of higher learning to which they are [...]

[Read more →]